Free Saving St. Germ by Carol Muske-Dukes Page A

Albert.”
    I looked at his carefully handwritten notes next to the flask. Under the headings PURPOSE, REACTION, APPARATUS, PROCEDURE, OBSERVATION, and DATA, he’d written exactly what he’d caused to happen. And how. I pulled off my goggles and read the notations with interest: not a wasted word.
    There was a loud glassy crash across the lab. I put down Albert’s lab book and hurried toward the noise. Here was another one of my students, Donald Brandeman, who’d come up to me after class recently and told me that I was “wasting precious time” by airing my political views in class. Donald was a tall, handsome, blank-faced boy with sculpted, metallic hair and an irritatingly expansive manner. When I tried to talk to him privately, he always insisted on drawing others, his pals, into the conversation. He was a frat boy, a competitive swimmer; he wanted to be a successful scientist employed by a large corporation with government contracts and he wanted an end to my “unnecessary digressions,” as he put it. I found clichéd behavior amusing, because I always assume the presence of irony, but after a while, it occurred to me that Donald Brandeman was very earnest.
    I was used to getting along with my students. It surprised me that he disliked me so intensely and, though I’d never have admitted it, it hurt my feelings. I had overheard him telling his friends in the hallway just outside my office that UGC was sorry they’d hired me, but they “had to have a woman” for Affirmative Action reasons and now they were stuck with me. “She doesn’t produce ,” I heard him say, “not like the male professors.”
    I was sensitive on the subject of my career at UGC. I was a hotshot from the East when they hired me, a demon gene-splicer, on the synthetic-protein trail; since I’d married Jay and given birth to Ollie, my research had moved to the back burner, my reading and lab time dwindled. I’d sat in my office for a long time after taking in the boy’s comments, which I knew had been destined for my ears. I sat there until it got dark.
    As I approached him, Donald Brandeman looked coy. There was shattered glass at his feet, but he made no move to pick up. Three of his ever-present companions, coughing into their hands and shrugging, backed away as I came up. One of them snapped the straps of his goggles like a rubber band.
    “What happened here, Donald?”
    “Aaaah, Prof Charbonneau, I don’t know.” He hung his head and glanced sideways at his pals. “I broke a standard taper joint, I guess. It leaped right out of my hand.”
    “How?”
    “How? Umm, well ... hmmm, good question.” There were muffled snorts of laughter behind him. “Yeah, good question. Well, I was having some trouble getting the ... male and female fittings together, you know.” The laughter grew. “And I was trying to stick the male into the ... female and it wasn’t, you know, sliding right in ... so I got some, whaddayacallit, stopcock joint grease here and it just got me so slippery, Prof, you know, the stopcock grease lubricant and the glass fitting shot right out of my hand like a ...well, um, I don’t know what ...” The pals were rocking with laughter now.
    “Shut up,” I said calmly. “Not one of you goons is going to pass this semester, so how ’bout hauling ass back to your hoods and boiling some water. Maybe you’ll be able to keep house when you flunk out of college. I’m talking to Brandeman here, not you guys.”
    The pals shuffled apart; there was a mumble or two, then quiet as they returned to their places.
    “What you were doing here,” I said, “had nothing to do with Grignard, did it?”
    “Well, Prof ...”
    “You guys were just having a little fun, right?”
    Donald Brandeman looked back at me with an absolutely contemptuous face. His skin had a filmy sheen to it, I noticed, wondering if his rigorous daily immersion in chlorine had given him a permanent subcutaneous gloss. His hair gleamed mutedly, slick